Best remembered today for Carrie's War, Nina Bawden was one of Britain's great observers of family life, particularly the tensions that accumulate beneath ordinary domestic routines.

A Little Love, A Little Learning, first published in 1980, follows Joanna as she attempts to rebuild her life after divorce, negotiating motherhood, desire, work and independence without the neat resolutions expected of the traditional domestic novel.

Her prose is economical but psychologically exact, attentive to the compromises and small negotiations that shape everyday lives. Rather than offering simple moral judgments, the novel explores what adulthood actually feels like: uncertain, compromised, occasionally funny, and always in motion. A thoughtful rediscovery for readers of Margaret Drabble, Elizabeth Taylor, Penelope Mortimer and Anita Brookner, and a reminder that Bawden's writing deserves a far wider readership than it enjoys today.

Virago Modern Classics paperback. Light shelf and edge wear with faint creasing to the cover; clean, tightly bound interior.